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We already have id Tech 4 (Doom 3 engine) and the Torque 3D engine (Tribes 2), as well as many other open source engines (many of which are improved derivatives of the Quake engines).

idTech4 and Torque are sub-par engines. There is a reason both have been tossed over the wall to the Open Source crowd (note that neither was produced by a FOSS development model): they're commercially irrelevant. If either were still good enough to sell licenses with you can bet they'd both still be proprietary. I'd rather see a cheap proprietary engine you can make quality games with than a bazillion Free engines you can make only mediocre games with.

Leadwerks looks decent. I haven't used it, but their toolset looks like someone put some time and effort into making iteration times low, which is by far the most key thing. Hopefully it lives up to their claims. I took a look to see what games it's been used for, but all the first 3 pages of Google hits on "leadwerks games" gave me was articles on Leadwerks coming to Linux, so I don't have much to really look at. Hopefully the gaming community makes some nice Linux games with this thing.

idTech4 and Torque are sub-par engines. There is a reason both have been tossed over the wall to the Open Source crowd (note that neither was produced by a FOSS development model): they're commercially irrelevant. If either were still good enough to sell licenses with you can bet they'd both still be proprietary. I'd rather see a cheap proprietary engine you can make quality games with than a bazillion Free engines you can make only mediocre games with.

I dont really know what you mean with "sub-par" maybe my english is to bad? but they were tossed "over the wall" because carmak had a thing for linux in some way. Nowadays Id soft is commercialy a disaster from a nearly technology leader to a total flopp. but in the days from especily quake2 and quake3 it was the best you could get. at least the commercialy most successful engines of that time.

that they are not invented by foss is true... that has different reasons, one is that software as service modell with free software is often a 1vs1 thing. so stuff where a company needs more than one customer to get enough money to build it is difficult to organise with foss lisense. But that did nowadays change by crowd-founding, so its pretty reasonable that the crowd get what they pay for...

I would feel dumb if I would take money from somebody for that that I would sell him something. thats like I go to bmw say to them I pay you 50.000 euro if you sell me a car for the normal price. even worse I would give them 50.000 euro so they would consider to rent me a car for much money and they desite how I use it.

But ok so far with that, software as a product is in our braindead world a strange accepted thing, have to accept that I live between morrons.

But there is another thing that hindered that good engines were developed (except ogre and co...) that this engines were converted to opensource so there were less need to write it, if nothing woudl be there there would be more reason to write one.

And the last reason is, that game engines are pretty much one of the last things linux-devs would care about. They cost much money and there is no money in it... because games are only for consumers and linux is king in b2b but not good in b2c because for b2c you cant get big income per customer you need a big mass of customers so b2c is only interesting if you have hundrets of millions of customers.

So its not the development model, its just that nobody needs it. nobody NEEDS games... it can be ah nice time-waste but its not more.

And there is another thing... the business modell of blockbuster games do not fit well with opensource models, opensource is not that wasteful, you dont generate 2-5 years a big big software project then release it users use it for 2-3 months then 99% of the users deletes it from the harddisks forever.

I would even go the other way, the commercial industrie now sees that they failed with that modell, they now create mmos that live long, that gets not deleted after 2 months were players play it for years. And yes its even software as a service, and here opensource is stronger and here opensource was ahead for long time. And here again commercial software clones prinzipieals of opensource models, to copy stuff to clone wow 1000 times and make everything a bit better. except in opensource you clone stuff less often most of the time...

so the opensource development prinzipiels did suceed, except coupled with drm + closedsource.

btw dont be so nose-upwards-pointing (is taht a word ^^) stuff like blender did happen in linux, so why should there not be a "AAA" Engine someday.

Even our moneysystem and stuff like that will most probably so openosurce is bigger than some commercial system that are build on top of a dieing economical system.